Visa preps AI-ready credit cards for automated shopping transactions

AI has transformed everyday tasks such as writing, coding — even shopping. Now, Visa is introducing an initiative to prepare its payment network for a new era of agentic AI shopping experiences.  

On Wednesday, the company unveiled Visa Intelligent Commerce at the Visa Global Product Drop. According to the release, this initiative opens Visa’s payment network to developers and engineers who are building agentic AI shopping experiences that find and buy products for users. 

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Moreover, Visa Intelligent Commerce is a commercial partner program for AI platforms that includes a suite of integrated APIs developers can use to deploy Visa’s AI commerce capabilities. 

According to Visa, the program offers AI-ready credit cards that replace card details with tokenized digital credentials; AI-powered personalization, which (with user consent) shares basic Visa spend and purchase insights to improve Agent performance; and AI payments, which let AI agents make transactions with clear guidelines set by the user. 

Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, Jack Forestell, compared this wave of transformation to the transition from physical shopping to online, and then online to mobile, with AI setting a new standard for commerce. 

“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase, and manage on their behalf,” said Forestell. “These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well.”

To bring this initiative to life, Visa will collaborate with many AI industry leaders, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, Stripe, and more.

People increasingly rely on AI to shop for them, finding exactly what they want in less time and more efficiently. For example, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have implemented AI-powered shopping features within their chatbots to help users find what they need conversationally. 

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Visa’s initiative is taking this one step further by removing friction at the payment stage in this AI-driven commerce era, helping merchants and consumers enjoy a more seamless and secure personalized experience. Other payment networks have introduced similar initiatives. 

Yesterday, Mastercard announced Mastercard Agent Pay, its agent-based AI payment program. This program is also meant to deliver more secure and personalized payment experiences in the age of AI. According to the company, the program introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens and a partnership with Microsoft to develop new use cases and “scale agentic commerce.” 

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